American Comparative Literature Association Honors Four Women Scholars for Co-Edited Collection of Essays

The American Comparative Literature Association has presented the 2024 René Wellek Prize for Best Edited Collection to Pooja Rangan, Akshya Saxena, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, and Pavitra Sundar for their co-edited book, Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method and Practice (University of California Press, 2023). The award-winning book is an interdisciplinary collection of essays discussing accent as mode of perception that includes looking, listening, acting, reading, and thinking.

Pooja Rangan is an associate professor of English in film and media studies and chair of film and media studies at Amherst College in Massachusetts. She specializes in contemporary documentary media cultures. She is the author of Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Duke University Press, 2017).

Dr. Rangan is an honors graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio where she majored in cinema studies. She received her master’s degree and Ph.D. in modern culture and media from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

Akshya Saxena is an assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where she holds affiliate faculty appointments in the department of Asian studies and the department of cinema and media studies. Her scholarly interests include 20th and 21st century literature, focusing on South Asia and Anglophone Africa. She is the author of Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India (Princeton University Press, 2022).

Dr. Saxena received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is an assistant professor of English with an affiliate appointment in the department of transnational Asian studies at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Her scholarly endeavors focus on the intersections of ethnic, postcolonial, and Anglophone literary studies. Earlier in her career, she taught at the University of Arizona, the University of Nevada Reno, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Srinivasan holds a bachelor’s degree in literature from Duke University and a Ph.D. in rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley.

Pavitra Sundar is an associate professor of literature at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. Her areas of expertise include cinema and media studies, postcolonial literary and cultural studies, sound studies, and women’s and gender studies, with a particular focus on South Asian cultures. She is the author of Listening with a Feminist Ear: Soundwork in Bombay Cinema (University of Michigan Press, 2023).

Dr. Sundar is a gradaute of Ithaca College in New York where she double-majored in English and psychology. She holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in women’s studies and English from the University of Michigan.